Reflexivity

Reflexivity becomes important for the social scientist the moment she or he realizes that there is not a defined line or barrier separating her or him (the subject) from the object of inquiry.

The idea that the subject influences its object of inquiry is widespread in both the natural and social sciences. In the field of anthropology, for example, the relationship between the subject and object is relatively easy to conceptualize. It now seems incredibly obvious that an anthropologist who has “embedded” herself or himself in a community in order to study that community’s social and cultural practices will influence and even disturb those very social and cultural practices. The subject and object are parts of the same world and in this case interact with one another to mutually construct the world, if only temporarily. In the natural sciences, for example in biology, the environment of the laboratory and the actions of the researcher can alter, even if only slightly, the natural phenomena taking place under the microscope. Although these are but two broad examples from the enormous realm of science, they are indicative of a broader problem: there is always some kind of relationship, no matter how seemingly insignificant, between the subject and the object. This applies, too, to the historians or philosophers confined to their offices and not only to the anthropologist in the bush. The philosopher or historian is, after all, still a part of some society, has some kind of identity, and interacts at some level with the universe around her or him (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). These interactions, however, are not mere trifles; rather, they greatly influence even desk-bound scientists. These ideas will be unpacked further in Chapters 3 and 4, but at this point, it is necessary to the author’s situatedness and entangledness relative to the objects of inquiry. This will shed light not only on the methodological and theoretical

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decisions made in the preparation of this dissertation but will allow for a more frank and comprehensive discussion of the findings.

To begin, my motivations to look at the historical developments of educational reforms in India and Germany against the backdrop of the reproduction of inequality reflect, at the most basic level, my yearning to understand something by which I have long been baffled, namely the social role of education. I have spent decades in the classroom, as a pupil, student and teacher, so it is safe to say that my befuddlement has most definitely not been a result of my lack of familiarity with classrooms, education or education systems. What is more, both of my parents are trained teachers, as are (and were) many additional family members and friends. My nearly hereditary familiarity with the practice of education, however, has not lent itself to a real understanding of the ways in which schools, culture, society, politics and even economics interact.

My decision to select India and Germany as case studies is really just a reflection of my profound interest in both places. This is not to say that I am not fascinated by my “home”

country, the United States; rather, it will become evident that not only is my understanding of education and schools shaped by my autobiographical details but that my ideas about reform are heavily influenced by the American educational experience. In that sense, although I have spent time in both Germany and India, I feel as though my not having been socialized in either place lends me a certain amount of detachment from both objects of inquiry, a detachment that will ideally lead to valuable insights into the machinations of each place and, more importantly, the interactions between the cases. That being said, I have experienced and read my way into both places, and it is not as if either place is truly foreign to me.

My decision to focus on the historical, sociological aspects of each place starting in 1945 and 1947, respectively, stems from a somewhat morbid fascination with chaos, or to put it more appropriately, a fascination with attempts to remake the social world. I would refer to myself as a student of revolutions, with a particular interest in the American, French and Russian revolutions. Germany 1945 and India 1947 were revolutionary times and places in much different ways from the aforementioned political revolutions. Why nothing revolutionary took place in the education systems in either place during these phases is a question worth asking, and while I will not be able to provide a definitive answer to that question, my attempts to understand the relationship between history, reform, culture and

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society will help contextualize the lack of revolutionary action in the field of secondary education.

I ought to briefly mention, as well, my own formal education in order to provide some context for Chapters 3-7. I attended public schools in a middle-upper-middle class, second-tier suburb of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. In Minnesota, the bulk of school funding is tied directly to local property taxes within each school district, meaning the districts with the bigger, more expensive lots and housing enjoy much larger budgets than do school districts in less affluent areas. I liked knowledge and learning, but I detested school.

Looking back, I suppose I was lucky to have been raised in a well-funded school district which offered many co- and extra-curricular “activities” in fine arts and athletics. My university education, starting at the University of Minnesota, was perhaps more revealing in terms of forming my position toward my objects of inquiry. My major was “Global Studies”

with a geographical emphasis on Europe and a thematic emphasis on “Peace, Governance and Justice”. This bears mentioning here, as I believe I was part of a then-novel generation of students that was trained interdisciplinarily and with an eye toward a then-burgeoning field, namely globalization studies.

The courses I attended were framed by “important” ideas to which I was introduced during my first year of studies, including Edward Said’s Orientalism, Michel Foucault’s Governmentality, Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s criticisms of Enlightenment thought, to name but a few. This early interdisciplinary, critical phase of my education allowed me to explore these ideas as they related to my other courses in political science, international relations, geology, anthropology and development studies, not to mention courses in German studies and journalism, which were my minor subjects. Important here is that I learned that probing the relationship between academic fields – interdisciplinarity or even pluralism – can lead to a deeper understanding of all aspects of a given object of inquiry and that this understanding, though invariably rife with abstractions, renders a person more capable of getting to the root of knowledge. Although these ideas would come to me later, the proverbial seed was planted during my bachelor studies.

The final formative phase of my education happened within the broad confines of the Global Studies Programme, a master’s program then based out of Freiburg, Germany, which allowed me to study topics related to development, politics, political economy, sociology and

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labor studies in India (at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi) and South Africa (at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban). This experience in the context of a “global”

program sparked a further interest in understanding a so-called globalized world from the perspective of a comparative study. That I was able to read and experience my way into all three places was particularly enjoyable, and I believe that experience cemented the idea that knowledge is multifaceted and thus endeavors to approach or even approximate knowledge must rely on interdisciplinarity, pluralism and even creativity.

There is an old joke about how a trained social scientist is like a duck, at least insofar as a duck can perform many tasks (swim, fly and “walk”). The problem, of course, is that a duck performs none of these tasks particularly well. Its ability to perform all three, to be pluralistic in its movements, makes it unique among feathered creatures. To the extent that I have been trained, in the broadest sense, as a social scientist, I feel it would be dishonest of me to narrow my focus to one specific field, for a broad training does not lend itself to efficacy in a narrowly defined subject or field. In what is left of this methodology section, I will explain why I made the research decisions I did and how these decisions can be understood in the context of pluralism. Before doing that, however, I will further explore my own situatedness when it comes to normative and even political notions, with my rationale being that once these have been engaged with, something closer to a value-free or at least reflexive analysis can unfold.

I am cynical when it comes to formal politics of all persuasions, and this deep cynicism not only has to do with my own reading of political biographies, treatises and histories but also with my own experiences, something which is perhaps endemic for those of us who came of age politically in the buildup to the Iraq War. Although I will refuse here to degrade myself by labeling my own political beliefs, I should point out that I am an equal opportunity cynic, which in practical terms means that I am equally distrustful of social democrats, for example, as I am of “free” liberals. Beyond those narrow constructs, it should be apparent through reading this dissertation that my own political/normative compass is oriented somewhere between Adorno’s words: “There is no right life in the wrong life”

(Adorno 1994: 42; translated by author) and the well-worn idiom: “Live and let live”.

The above autobiographical details relate my own situatedness in relation to education. It does, after all, mean something that I am a male, middle-class American citizen living in Germany who has spent the better part of three decades in different classrooms and

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who has experienced, lived in and worked in several different countries. Whether these combined experiences will provide new insights of any kind will be seen. This is probably the most honest statement I can make: I do not have the right to speak for anyone else. I do, however, have the right to speak about anything.